Preface

Intelligent agent-based systems constitute one of the most exciting research areas in artificial intelligence. Owing to the growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, a number of applications addressing clinical problems are already based on agent technology. Current topics of research include personalized health systems for remote and autonomous tele-assistance, communication, and co-operation between distributed intelligent agents to manage patient care, information agents that retrieve medical information from distributed repositories, intelligent and distributed data mining, and multi-agent systems that assist the doctors in the tasks of monitoring, decision support, and diagnosis. Several methodological and technical problems have been discovered by researchers who attempt to deploy agent-based systems in the medical area; just to name a few, the growing number of huge databases that need to be integrated (e.g., genetic data from next-generation sequencing), the difficulty to integrate new agent-based systems with legacy software, the need to apply changing national and international laws and regulations concerning the privacy of medical data, and the security of the transaction of patient information between agents.